Drupal 7 will receive end-of-life status in 2021

The Drupal Association announces that as of November 2021 Drupal 7 will no longer be supported. Administrators who have not yet migrated are advised to prepare to migrate to version 8.

Drupal 7 was released in January 2011 and will reach its end of life at the end of 2021 after more than ten years, reports the Drupal Association. The Drupal Security Team will no longer provide security updates from then on, although commercial parties may come with paid updates on a limited basis as part of Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support.

Because support will end and Drupal 7 could be classified as insecure from the end of 2021, the team behind the platform recommends migrating to Drupal 8 for administrators who have not yet done so. The team also promises that the upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9 won’t cost as much headache as the upgrade from 7 to 8.

Drupal 8 adoption is slow. According to Drupal statistics, there are 315,000 sites running version 8, compared to 827,000 still using version 7. The EOL notification comes at a time when security company Imperva warns that a leak in Drupal that was patched on February 20 is being abused. Attackers would look for vulnerable sites and try to add cryptominers to them. The vulnerability allows arbitrary PHP code execution, but is only present when Drupal 8 core RESTful and json:api modules are present.